NL
Screening
Screening
Part of Coltan, Cosmos and the Ancestors

Postcolonial Dilemna Track #3 (Unended)

2017, 7 mins

The chaotic dissonance of the opening scenes gradually gives way to an eerily quiet, solitary passage for the astronaut. Moving in a slow, almost dance-like manner through a wooded path entangled with climbing vines, they reach toward an object that appears to function as a kind of receptor within this unfamiliar or forgotten landscape. Although the path they follow was clearly formed before their arrival, no trace remains of who or what created it. 

The film culminates as the astronaut arrives at a vast waterfall and raises their arms—an ambiguous gesture that reads equally as triumph and surrender.

Reflecting on these tensions, Michel Ekeba of Kongo Astronauts notes:

“As a Congolese citizen, I dream of other worlds and going to space, but most of the Congolese population lives without clean water and without electricity. For many, to admit this desire would be, as rapper Maitre Gims puts it, humiliating oneself. […] We are creating the conditions for an uninhabitable earth while the most sophisticated telescopes search for habitable planets.”

He continues, 

“Having a stable internet connection in the DRC to learn about issues of international space policy and take a stand is a luxury, to study astronautics is a luxury, to think about what Elon Musk is undertaking with SpaceX is a luxury, but we want to discuss all these subjects, in order to contribute to the orientations of space research and perhaps to influence it… instead, at the moment, the technology is falling on our heads! […] For example, on August 24, 2020, one of the Google Loon balloons that provide internet to rural areas around the world fell into the Congolese jungle near Buta. Being in a state of weightlessness in a zero-G flight is a superhuman feat that I would like to experience in order to be able to transmit to others a unique experience of reality; going into space would be even more amazing, even though I know that this is not just fun. Out of these impossibilities is constructed a poem between art and science.” 


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